Maggelburg is a small town that's surrounded by the Forest of the
Massgraves, a forest that's supposed to be haunted and that's linked to a
mass murder from 20 years ago. Nowadays, the forest is mainly roamed by
Neo Nazis, junkies and gays looking for some outdoor privacy. All others
tay away, and wisely so.

Now Hector Da Silva (Jann Halexander) has gone
deep in the wood, and never returned. His sister Ariane (Ariane.) starts
to worry about him - even though he stole away her HIV-positive boyfriend
(Olivier Magdeleine). Her first attempt to look for him in the forest
leads to her almost being raped though, mainly because her attackers take
offense to her dark skin. So she joins up with Severia (Maik Darah), a
sort-of shaman who has dedicated her life to investigating the secrets of
the forest. The two of them make an excursion into the forest, and the
deeper they get in, the more apparent it becomes Hector is obviously dead.
Eventually, they feel something after them, a man in perfect Ku Klux Klan
outfit. Severia doesn't survive the encounter, but Ariane witnesses the
villain remove his mask, to find out it's Hector ... which of course can't
be, Hector's dead.

It's later that Ariane learns from her mom about
Hector's twin Statross Reichmann, the contradictory HIV-positive coloured
gay Nazi ... but why is he after her?

Storywise, La Bête
Immonde has all the right elements to become an over-the-top piece of
trash: Paranormal investigators, Neo Nazis, a haunted forest, a dark
family secret and so on and so forth. The film on hand though is anything
but that, it's more of a lyrical meditation on the themes at hand (and
then some) with the haunted forest being the metaphorical center of a film
(though metaphor for what seems to be open to everyone's interpretation).

All
of this is carried by a delibertely slow pace, with several long and
static takes, a focus on the (often haunting) beauty of nature and the
like. The result is a very unusual but quite fascinating movie.